


days of clover, a garden song

by Kaiosea



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Middle School, First Meetings, M/M, Magical Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 22:37:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4497354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaiosea/pseuds/Kaiosea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This door holds magic. (We know who's on the other side.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. honey

**Author's Note:**

> There were two ideas I had here:  
> 1\. “they have a door that attaches their childhood rooms together” (I told myself I wasn't going to write this back in March when I thought of it. Oops.)  
> 2\. write something in a style that isn't natural to me and that I haven't consciously tried to do before
> 
> Yep, that's about it :D

The moving lasts all day, much longer than Hinata had thought it would. 

The final truck leaves when the moon’s up in the sky, his little sister’s been passed out for ages, and his own eyelids are shuttering with exhaustion. So he takes a lemon drink from the refrigerator and braves the snowdrift of boxes back to his new room, anticipating sleep. He thinks it’s over; doesn’t know that tomorrow, he’ll wake up to find he’s lost his earphones, his mom left the pans at the old house so they get takeout for a week, and his best pillow is gathering mildew inside a basement box. He’ll find out that moving takes months longer than a day, and the settling-in even longer still, but all of that hasn’t come to matter yet; for today, he’s found his bed. 

Goldie, his lion, asks him how he’s doing as he slides under covers, and he buries his nose in her warm mane, falling into a cool sleep. 

Seconds or hours later when he opens his eyes again, she roars for him as he stuffs his own scream into her fur. 

There are two doors in his room. 

He looks to his right. The door at the far wall, where he exits to the narrow hallway, he walked through it earlier, but the one a few feet from the foot of his bed, staring him down, that was definitely not there before. 

Knees quaking, he gathers his courage where he finds it tucked behind the pillow and walks over. He washes the door with his palms. It’s solid and real, but shabby, with uneven wood, and it swells and deflates, almost breathes beneath his hands. When he looks at his wrists, outlined in moonlight on flecked grain, they’ve stopped trembling. Something living like this, in the illicit space of a boundary line, it can’t be bad, and he falls back asleep with a promise to remember. 

He asks his mom about the door in the morning. 

“What door?” She’s using the voice when she pretends not to know Hinata’s up to something. “There isn’t a door in your room. The neighbors prefer to be left alone.” 

“I don’t want someone coming through the door. It’s mine.” 

She winks, bends down, kisses his forehead, and he shakes it off. He's old enough to dislike it when she humors him. “Then you’d better keep it under lock and key.”

*

The day after, the door unlocks itself, but it doesn’t open. Clenching fists to his cheeks, he tiptoes to the lock only to hear it being turned from the other side. He is shocked to realize that there's a person behind the door, that it's someone else’s breathing that quakes its frames, because a door can't be alive.

*

In the next year, Hinata figures out lots of things. He stops forgetting which kitchen cabinet holds bowls and which holds dishtowels. He learns that he loves volleyball, that he’s not tall enough for it, and that he lags behind in more than height—he’s late, so late that after school he only pretends to understand when they talk about red things: red dreams, lips and body words that he deems too precise or crude to repeat when he doesn't know them firsthand. They all sound red. 

He hears his neighbor before they meet. A voice deepened before Hinata’s has started cracking, a tenor straining to hit the notes of a bass. It's the strain that worries him. He wonders if he should send help through the door proper, for the voice that talks when it’s dark. But there’s no frenzy, and the commotion doesn’t last long. 

He only hears it at night, and he doesn’t remember during the day. 

Sometimes the click from the other side sounds defiant, like its user needs to shut people out. Other times it’s faint. Other, other, times Hinata doesn’t hear it at all.

*

Volleyball gives him purpose in exhaustion, bruised toenails to strained neck, and he thinks it’s natural, fantastic. He’s got new shoes, teammates, got soul, got heart, what he doesn’t have is a starting position but that’s got to be natural, too. 

When he gets home, he’s so tired he routinely forgets to lock the door in his room, and it rattles him awake night after night.

*

As the last year of middle school draws to a close, he notices the door again because it starts to smell. Not in a bad way. It’s wonderfully appetizing, like flour desserts or the lemon drink in the summertime. 

Like long-slumbering royalty, he is roused by an irresistible call. He’s sure it’s the door, scoured his room for the source, because it’s a perfume he’d want to give to the person he liked, so he could inhale it all the time. 

The smell is like something he knew for years, something he once treasured and lost in a rotten cardboard box—a flat dandelion suspended in a favorite book, an old teacher’s farewell scribble on math homework. 

He creeps on tingling feet and nudges a blushing ear closer. The call widens to a siren, tenor to bass. He doesn’t dare lock the door and scare away the voice, because he hears what it has been saying all along. 

The door blows lavender scent through the wood, and the air around Hinata slowly turns red.

*

One day Hinata pushes the rough-hewn handle and falls over the threshold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I estimate the second part in about one to two weeks, but I have a lot going on so no promises on when it'll come, just that it will.
> 
> Comments are great!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"I estimate the second part in about one to two weeks,"_ haha yeah, sure 
> 
> Day 3 my own "fic amnesty" week. Had over half of this written for many, many months, but did not have the drive, time, or confidence to finish until now. Happy to have written this now!

Empty as the room is, it would seem fuller with photographs. But Hinata can’t find any, no evidence of who lives in this room or who their beloveds might be. His fingers leave filmy oil over the shelves’ display: shining trophies. He blows layers of dust away from their pedestals. 

_Volleyball,_ Hinata thinks, and his heart sings, _he’s like me!_

He sneaks around like the smallest pigeon at the pond where he throws bread-crumbs glancing over the bedspread: navy blue, plain; walls: volleyball poster, plain; desk: lined with books, boring. 

But the smell is everywhere. 

The sweetness in the air thickens. He hears a creak, coming from not the door he entered through, but the other one, which means Hinata throws himself into his room and locks the shared door behind himself. 

His chest heaves. 

There is a knock on the door.

*

His name is Kageyama, and he comes through the door. 

“I’ve been here before,” he says, eyes darting from wall to wall. “A big golden lion, and a black cat. I thought it was a dream.” 

Hinata looks at Goldie, all plucked fur like a wheat-field in November. 

“Are you human?” Hinata asks. “If you live there, but you don’t go to my school…” 

“I go to private school. Oh,” Kageyama scowls. “I used to. I’m not going back next year.” 

Hinata thinks, _Volleyballvolleyballvolleyball._ When did he start playing? He wonders, and asks. 

Kageyama tells him. 

“That was the year my room started to smell.” 

Kageyama shrugs like he doesn’t know what he means.

*

“Let's go play volleyball,” Kageyama says, and Hinata follows him. School is in the opposite direction, so Hinata rarely slides by this part of town, but it’s very close-by. Kageyama might be part faery. It doesn’t help that as they continue, Hinata is increasingly knocked over by the air; full-bodied and humming with sweetness. They’ve come to an open field, and Kageyama stops. 

“Is this your lair?” Hinata says. “Is this the part where you eat me?” 

“I don’t eat human.” Kageyama produces a volleyball from thin air. 

“Toss to me!” 

Blocked out under the sun, Kageyama burns too bright for his eyes. They spend an eternity matching each other there, and Hinata finally falls down almost dead with the exhaustion in his bones. Kageyama glares at him and his fingers twitch on the ball, back in his hands. Like he wants to keep going.

Hinata molds himself into the grass. He nestles a clover on his tongue, and the taste blooms in his cheeks.

*

They talk through the door at night and leave it swinging in the day. 

Hinata walks him in the other direction of the field a week later. 

“Is this where you go to school?” Kageyama asks, his face looking weird. Weirder than usual, pinched cheeks and narrow eyes. 

“We’re close.” 

Kageyama turns over his shoulder, and his face does something weirder still, cheeks seizing up and nose going red. “It smells like you,” he mumbles. “That’s it.” His hands disappear into his pockets. 

“Really?” Hinata says, and he catches Kageyama sniffing the air, closing his eyes. “I thought it was juniper.” 

Seemingly out of words, Kageyama gives him the ball. 

Hinata accepts with wide eyes and dry-swallows, because now, his hands feel red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think! Thanks for reading, especially if you've waited a long time for part 2.


End file.
